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AMD Ryzen 5 2600 AM4 CPU Review: Page 5 of 6

Overclocking

Any time you overclock, it’s best to have good cooling. For this section, we don’t use the stock heatsink and move to watercooling based on EK’s Supremacy Evo block, an EKWB PE 240 radiator and a strong pump.

AMD’s Ryzen 5 2600 has a base clock of 3.4GHz but often spends its time closer to its max boost clock of 3.9GHz as you see here.

We’ll start out locking all cores a 4.0GHz

This gives us a modest 29 point gain in Cinebench.

Pushing up to what was the practical ceiling on the 1st generation Ryzen processors, 4.1 GHz, we see a really good jump in score of 84 points to clear the 1400 mark.

Taking baby steps, we move on up to 4.2GHz to gain another 38 points.

We were able to get 4.3GHz perfectly stable but we were starting to get temperatures approaching the 80C range and gains seems to be minimal now. More importantly, we are seeing the boards LLC kick the voltages into the upper 1.4V range which we think is just too high for daily use even though you should be perfectly fine short term for benchmarking. 4.2GHz seems to be the sweet spot on voltage, temperature and performance gains.

Power Consumption

Overclocked to 4.2 GHz gives us 193W, just a bit over a 50W increase but the Ryzen 5 2600 is quite efficient, barely clearing 140W at stock.